Tag: daughter

This is a full review of The Bridge: Series 4, Episode 7. Catch up with all the reviews here. Don’t read on unless you’re completely up-to-date on the BBC2 schedule!

Happily we still have a Henrik this week. Our brave and stupid Dane gets off with a serious pain in the leg and a severe tongue lashing from boss Lillian about his ridiculous risk-taking. As predicted the GoPro killer (what is his/ her official nickname?) didn’t want to shoot Henrik as death to them is the easy way out. He wants his victims to suffer.

The Case

Chris flees from crazy Frank locking him up in the old factory. Frank looks like his hobby is well-planned. He’s got history in kidnapping kids.

Decapitation and firing squad are the methods left unchecked on the team’s control room list. So that’s equal parts terrifying and spectacular.

Mysterious dead Douglas was a Private Investigator who Niels says he hired after his wife’s death to hurry the investigation along. Saga uncovers private police documents in his office that show the mole in the team is working hard on leaking sensitive information all over the place.

Saga is on to Anna, Astrid and Frank thanks to Chris’ confession about killing Dan in the Village of the Damned. Frank seems so reasonable but there’s a monster is hiding just under the surface of respectability. In this episode Frank’s answer to everything is violence. The tension is unbearable as Frank locks the front door and goes to find Astrid toting a shotgun. (“For fucks’ sake! We demand a happy ending!” is written in my notes at this point.) Why did the sniper not take the clear shot he had at Frank’s squishy little head? And how come they can organise a whole SWAT team for a cold case with little to no notice? Those questions aside, good work team!

Oh the BBC is so very proud of being able to bang on about Jodie Whittaker in the role of a doctor. Haha! Ho Ho! What japes! But not that Doctor, not yet. Hold your horses folks. First we see her in Trust Me, a new 4 part drama as a “doctor” – quotation marks very much intended.

As the first curtains swished open and the first bed sheets were turned down, I realised this is the first hospital drama I’ve watched since leaving hospital (10 days in May, nice people, nice room, but extremely painful procedure and that will let them down on the overall TripAdvisor score) and I’m actually watching it ill, so it’s all very relevant. The nurses who looked after me were absolutely fantastic, but literally did get the shit jobs, and the piss jobs, and the puke jobs and so on. It’s no wonder people aspire to more.

If you’ve not yet heard anything about the The Handmaid’s Tale, let me give you a hand getting out from under that rock where you’ve been hiding. This is an MGM production being show on Hulu in America. They seem to be a good 7 episodes ahead of us. Sadly, even in 2017, sometimes America is ahead of us in tv land. It’s great to have synchronised start dates, but it’s still not the norm. Avoiding spoilers for this much talked-about show is going to be a killer.

A few weeks after starting in the USA this 10 part drama series has been picked up by Channel 4 in the UK, which, as the young, intelligent, and left-leaning political channel is a really good fit for their brand and a bit of a coup. The series is based on a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and despite its startlingly relevant content was actually written in 1985. So this dystopian future Atwood envisaged is 30 years closer than we’d have hoped for, and none of her themes are any less relevant or possibilities presented any less realistic. In interviews Atwood says that none of these war crimes in the fictional Republic of Gilead are entirely made up – all have happened somewhere on the globe. This really is extremely dark stuff. Do we as the audience have the stamina to get through it?

The handmaids distinctive uniforms at a ceremony

The series opening is distressing, as our heroine Offred is violently parted from her husband and daughter, but it’s not a tense escape. We know she’ll get caught. The rippling tension comes from her social position at her new posting with the Commander (Joseph Feinnes) and his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).

The Last Dragonslayer on Sky 1 was a proper Christmas treat and should have been on everyone’s list to watch instead of the Doctor Who christmas episode, shown at the same time. In this reviewer’s opinion Doctor Who has been limping along since the unfortunate Peter Capaldi took over. The sooner we see new showrunner Chris Chibnall’s work in 2017 the better, although it’d take a miracle to lure me back. Anyway I digress…

This much more satisfying slice of fantasy was served up by novelist Jasper Fforde. I’ve read quite a few of Fforde’s weird postmodern literary stories but never realised he’d branched out into young adult fiction. Happy to report that while retaining his own odd identity (more on that later) this shared elements with classic YA stuff like the Harry Potter series, Rincewind’s adventures in the Discworld and the magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.

This is a full review, so if you want to avoid spoilers go watch it now and come back later.